Faculty Spotlight

College faculty briefly talk about their backgrounds, as well as their teaching and research.

Qingcong Yuan

(Department of Statistics)

The students are very good in terms of their learning attitude, their interest to do research projects, and their plans for their future career. They bring new ideas and suggestions to the class and to the program. I really enjoy working with students and helping them prepare for their future.

Lisa Werwinski

(Department of Statistics)

As a faculty member, I enjoy being able to focus on my students and how I can encourage them and help them be the best that they can be. I consider it an honor to be a part of my students' journeys and always love receiving emails from students years later telling me that they are grateful for what they learned in my class.

Haosheng Yang

I enjoy teaching a lot — especially the intellectual communication I have with my students, who call me Yang-laoshi ('teacher' in Chinese). I feel passionate about sharing my literary knowledge with my students.

Jonathan Strauss

(Department of French and Italian)

My favorite thing about teaching is getting an unexpected question or comment from a student that reveals something new about our discussion. For that reason I always make a point to listen carefully and adapt to student needs.

José Amador

(Department of Global & Intercultural Studies)

In my teaching, I try to develop students' critical thinking and writing skills in order for them to achieve their fullest potential. This entails a lot of classroom work and discussion. I encourage an atmosphere of open dialogue that is fact-based. Students must critically engage with primary sources to come up with potential answers to a historical question. My teaching philosophy is about engaging students with critical ideas that allow them to understand the past and reflect on the present.

Cameron Hay-Rollins

(Department of Anthropology)

I work to ignite my students' interest and passion in engaging with the world around them. Anthropology is very strange to a lot of people until they wrap their heads around it! So I usually start courses weighing class time towards lectures to give students a sense of how anthropologists think, and then shift the balance towards open discussions, so that the students and I learn from each other.

David Berg

(Department of Biology)

Bringing passion and enthusiasm into my courses is important to making students into active thinkers. We do a lot of inquiry-based and hands-on activities: laboratories, field trips, and even a bit of simulation modeling. Everything is designed to encourage the students to actively manage their own learning and to rely on their interest in what we are doing to help stimulate them.

Janardan Subedi

(Department of Sociology and Gerontology)

Providing my students a realistic understanding of life is very important to me. We all need critical knowledge, but it has its own limitations. I give students practical, day-to-day life examples to help them understand what life, society, health systems, diseases are all about. I always tell them that practical knowledge is as important as critical knowledge: so you need experience, to see the world, to travel, and go abroad.

Lynette Hudiburgh

(Department of Statistics)

Teaching is never boring. I love having an opportunity to develop relationships with my students. What's really exciting is when they come back and tell me how they can apply what they learned in my class to another.

College of Arts and Science

As the center of Miami's diverse liberal arts curriculum, the College of Arts and Science (CAS) fosters a rigorous intellectual climate that promotes learning and discovery. The CAS offers 63 majors, 58 minors, and 10 co-majors to undergraduate students, as well as about 30 masters and 10 doctoral programs.